Lifescan Animas Vibe Insulin Pump

The Animas Vibe has been designed to ease some of the hassle that can come with using an insulin pump.

Product:

Vibe

Manufacturer:

Animas

Amongst its key features are its direct integration with the Dexcom G4 Platinum CGM, its on board food database, to help with carb counting, and its proven to be waterproof for extended periods of time.

The Animas Vibe is therefore a strong choice for water lovers, children and other people that have experienced, or are wary of, water damage to their pump.

The pump is also a strong choice for people that are specifically looking for a pump integrated with the Dexcom G4 Platinum, which is, at time of writing, the most accurate CGM available.

Disadvantages

One disadvantage of the Animas Vibe is that it doesn’t have a linked blood glucose meter so results need to be entered manually to use the bolus calculator.

The lack of a separate remote may be a disadvantage to those that don’t wish to access their pump to program doses.

Another disadvantage that has been reported by users is that the user interface is not as intuitive as some other pumps and requires more button presses to access menus and functions.

Flexible diabetes management

The Animas Vibe offers a lot of choice over how you manage your diabetes. There are a number of different basal rates you can set your pump up to give and there’s choice with bolus rates as well, so that you can give a delayed or extended bolus for meals with higher fat or protein content.

The pump also offers the chance to select doses in very small increments. Basal rates can be set as low as 0.025 units per hour and boluses can be given in increments of 0.05 units.

Another way in which the Animas Vibe is flexible is that it uses a luer lock for infusion sets meaning that if you have a preferred infusion set that uses a luer lock, you won’t need to change onto a new type of infusion set.

Boluses made easy

The Animas Vibe has two features called ‘ezCarb’ and ‘ezBG’ which allows the pump to take into account your blood glucose level and the food you have had and suggest how much insulin to give.

The pump also recognises how much insulin has been recently given and is therefore still active. This helps to prevent insulin stacking and therefore helps to prevent hypos from occurring.

Basal doses

The pump allows you to set up to 12 basal rates over a 24 hour period day and 4 different basal programs can be set. This means you can have 4 different pre-programmed sets of basal rates to help in examples such as days when you may be doing extra exercise.

Food database

The pump allows you to upload a food database containing nutritional values of a large variety of foods which enables the pump to make informed decisions about how much insulin to give in response to different foods.

You can also customise the database by using OneTouch’s Diasend software.